Zcash

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Zcash

An update on Electric Coin Co.'s scaling research (focused primarily on layer 1), including Halo and sharding: In order to scale Zcash to 10 billion users by 2050, ECC CTO Nathan Wilcox has outlined two goals, usability continuity and UX-unobtrusive infrastructure. Usability continuity means that usability should not undergo qualitative changes as the network grows, e.g., changes in transaction flows or fee mechanics. UX-unobtrusive infrastructure refers to infrastructure that does not impact a user’s decision-making. For example, users should not need to understand whether the sender and the recipient are in the same shard or even that shards exist. In September 2019, ECC researcher Sean Bowe, along with Daira Hopwood and Jack Grigg, published Halo, a paper detailing a new technique that allows for the creation of efficient, recursive zero-knowledge proofs. Daira Hopwood presented a research proposal for sharding architecture at Zcon1 in June and again at the ZKP Amsterdam Community Event. Daira’s research proposal calls for the use of a technique that partitions a database into sections or “shards” to improve the throughput limit, in order to scale to high transaction volumes. ECC's research is ongoing. Read more: bit.ly/2Tudq9k